this modern love
by moeten
Summary: Barney returns a favor.


_don't get offended_

 _if i seem absent-minded,_

 _just keep telling me facts_

 _and keep making me smile._

* * *

The moment that it all hits Tracy is this one: the warm sun, the cool breeze, trees changing to yellow and orange, Barney still rambling away. And she thinks: _it's fall_ , and she thinks _Barney_ instead of _Barney Stinson_ or _my boyfriend's friend_ , and she's suddenly aware of how much the trajectory of her life has changed, how little she's noticed.

She kicks the leaves on the path and interrupts Barney's story about a plumber his mom used to date to ask him: "How did we get here?"

"The Ralph Abruzzo stuff is backstory for the time I rigged my high school's sprinkler system," Barney says, hands deep in the pockets of his wool coat. "See, I told him I wanted to be a plumber and —"

"No, I mean, _here_ ," Tracy says, makes an abortive waving gesture, and laughs, biting her lip and shaking her head at the idea that she's asking _Barney_ a philosophical question. "Not this park," she clarifies, before he can tell her _we walked_.

"Yeah, I'm confused," he says.

She _hmms_ and keeps walking. He doesn't finish his story, and they walk together, and she thinks about how Barney loves the sound of his own voice, but is actually pretty good at staying quiet when he needs to be, and she thinks about how he walks to her left so the bikers and skaters pass _him_ , and she thinks about pharmacies and bus stops. "It's like," she says, "when we met, I never thought I'd see you again?"

"Not an unusual thought for the women who meet me," Barney says. "Go on."

"And now we're friends, through Ted, I mean, and if you'd told me _that_ was going to happen last year, I never would have believed that. I wouldn't have believed I'd be with someone like Ted either," she says, heaving a breath, unable to really suppress a faint smile, and she catches Barney glancing at her out of the corner of his eye, "or hanging out with _his_ friends, and it's like… wow, how did any of this happen?"

"Umm… we're awesome, Ted's okay, you're pretty cool too," Barney says. "D'you mind if I smoke?"

"I thought you and Ted and Robin made a big sweeping declaration to quit back in June," Tracy says, as he pulls a lighter and pack of cigarettes out of his coat pocket. And she thinks: _see?_ because she _knows_ that, she knows these things, because she still hangs with Cindy and Kathy but more and more with Robin, and can't wait until Lily and Marshall and Marvin and the new baby come back to the States, and Barney shows up and takes her for lunchtime walks along Riverside Park a couple of times a week, like it's all normal and cool, to be friends with these people, for these people to be more than her boyfriend's friends, like suddenly she's been absorbed into this new _life_ , and she's not sure when the transition happened.

"Yeah," Barney answers, tapping the pack with his palm, withdrawing a cigarette, "I really think they've quit forever this time." He clicks the lighter, draws on his cigarette, holds it in his left hand so Tracy doesn't have to smell it too much. She rolls her eyes at him.

"It's just," Tracy says, going back to her main train of thought, "do you ever look at your life and go, wow, how did I end up here?"

Barney takes a long drag of his cigarette and doesn't immediately answer, exhaling smoke in a stream. "Did you want to end up somewhere else?" His face scrunches up. "Is this even 'the end?'"

"It's not the end," Tracy says, looking up at the yellowing elms, taking in a deep breath of the crisp fall air, cigarette smoke, leaves. "Like, this is so, so far from the end, but it's still — how did I _get_ here? How did any of us get here? I started hanging out with you guys _four months_ ago, and it's like this is my … new life." Saying it aloud makes her heart skip a beat, her stomach flutter, and she doesn't know yet if it's a good or bad feeling. "I like you guys and… there's Ted," she says, inhaling another smoky fall breath, "and how did I _get_ all this?"

"Do you like…" he wrinkles his nose, " _love_ Ted?"

She thinks about it, not because she needs to, but because she _is_ thinking about it, here in Riverside Park, with one of his best friends, who is quickly becoming the same to her. The way she loves Ted, the way this isn't _the end_ , the way this may be the beginning, or the middle, or the new life she's held herself away from for so long, the way she tripped and fell into it, the way it slid around her like a warm bath and she hadn't noticed because of how comfortable it all is. "I do," she says.

"And you guys are pretty serious," Barney hazards.

She nods. "I'm really happy!" She laughs self depreciatingly. "I mean, I probably sound like a crazy person here, full of self-loathing and doubt or whatever. I like Ted, I _love_ Ted. He's sweet and he's funny and he's a pretentious dork who corrects people _all the time_ , and even so he loves you guys, and Lily and Marshall, and, well, _me_ , I guess? So much. And I love that he's so, _that_ , and I love hanging out with you all, too! Lily and Marshall have sent me like ten postcards and I barely _know_ them, and Robin invites me to these super classy bars for drinks and _girl talk_ and I feel like I'm living in a movie, and you just show up and kidnap me on my lunch breaks and we just walk around like it's normal, like this is just… what we do now? Like I'm not Tracy McConnell, adorable recluse, but Tracy McConnell… _this_." Tracy inhales, exhales, feels her heart pound.

Barney scuffs his cigarette butt with his shoe. "Okay, I'm hearing a lot about how awesome we all are and not a lot of negatives," he says, shoving his hands back into his pockets.

Tracy laughs and to her dismay, her breath is a little shaky. "it's just — it's been _four months_." She smiles and blinks a few times.

"And sixteen days." He shrugs when she looks up at him, a little smile on his lips. "You met at me and Robin's wedding."

She smiles, that he knows it to the day, takes one big sniffle to clear herself up completely. "You're just a big ol' romantic, aren't you?"

"What? Total guesstimate," he scoffs. She hears a muffled clicking, like he's playing with his lighter in his pocket. "'Tracy McConnell, adorable recluse?'"

She smiles again, but it's brief. "It's just happening so fast. What if it goes away, you know?" He shrugs in reply. His lighter clicks and clicks. "I've lived my life in like, one way. Just one way. For a really long time. And now I have all this, and it's just so _fast_. What if it stops?" What if Ted breaks up with her? What if something goes wrong, and _she_ breaks up with _him_? Four months is nothing. A summer. A season. Leaves falling from the trees. Shoes last a summer. Jobs can last a summer. One of her umbrella's tines is starting to poke through. Four months doesn't prove anything, except that things change and fade and go. She has a new life, but it's not permanent. "Or what if it doesn't stop?" she says with a sigh. "I don't _want_ it to, I just wish…"

Barney laughs under his breath. "Don't tell Ted any of this, or he'll propose on the spot," he says, and her stomach and heart seem to twist and patter. "Or… do tell him this?" he amends, squinting at her.

"I don't want him to propose," Tracy says, her heart squeezing, and she shakes her head, because a part of her — she pictures it, the look he'd have, all earnest, his eyes big and hopeful, and he'd be nervous, taking a deep breath, his hands shaking as he opened the box — Someday, she tells herself, and gets that _four months_ and _forever_ feeling again. "Um, not —" Yet? Now? Right this second? "after four months."

"He's done it for less," Barney says, and tilts his head back, looks up at the blue sky. "Okay, I don't know how to give lovey dovey advice crap," he says. "That's a Lily thing. Or Ted," he adds, smirking. "So: what do you _want_?"

"I don't know," she says, and the words make her feel strangely hollow. She laughs it off. "I guess nothing. I guess I just wanted to, to talk things out to myself. And you totally owed me some soul-searching rambling after last year."

"Yeah, I do," Barney says, and he sounds strangely thoughtful. She almost asks him, but he takes a quick couple of steps so he's ahead of her, turning around to face her dead on on the path, his eyebrows raised and the corners of his mouth curling up. "But you said _I just wish_ , so, what?" He holds out his hand like he expects her to place something in it. "What do you want? Seriously," he says, quirking his eyebrows. "I will get it for you."

Tracy looks at him, her lips curling at his enthusiasm, the _I have a plan_ look in his eye. "I just want…" she trails off, shakes her head at him. Not a proposal, but _something_. Proof, maybe, that she can do this twice, _have_ this twice, have these friends and this new life through the fall and past winter, into next year and the next. That this isn't transient, that _how did I fall into this_ won't be like this forever, strange and exciting and new. "A sign," she says, unable to articulate it. His eyebrows raise. "A big ol' neon sign saying _this isn't a joke_ , you know?"

"You people and your signs from the universe," Barney mutters, kicking a leaf in front of his shoe.

"Not because I need one, but because… it'd be kind of nice to have," Tracy says, smiling, because she knows that's not how the world works. She almost ran into Ted one, two, dozens of times over the years, and maybe it was fate and maybe wasn't, but if she hadn't let go of Max and set Louis free, none of those chances would have come to anything at all. Her eyes cast around and spot a hot dog cart. "That failing, I could go for a coffee."

Barney's expression drags itself from the lawn and he perks up, pulling his wallet from his pocket. "See, _that_ one isn't crazy person talk," he says, taking out a twenty and handing it to Tracy. "Get yourself anything you want, kiddo."

"The way you just make stuff happen is awe-inspiring," Tracy says, taking the cash with a chuckle.

He shrugs and waggles an unlit cigarette in his fingers.

She leaves him to his sweeping declarations and smoking, heading a little farther down the leafy path to the cart. There aren't signs from the universe, not really. Sometimes you might get proof, understanding that what you're doing is the right thing after all, the feeling of fulfilment she gets when she makes real progress on her thesis, when a difficult song just _comes_ to her after weeks of practice. But sometimes you just do things because they seem right, or feel right, or they _are_ right, signs and destiny and the whole slow-motion movie moment, and they come to an end anyway. It's gotten easier to think about Max, to remember him without feeling _guilty_ about it, the way the details blur with time. It's gotten easier to celebrate her birthday, to have something good, to have something _else_ , to have Ted and to also have Max's memory without them being at odds or in competition. But things end. She'd thought once that her life with Max was everything, and it had gone like leaves and shoes and smoke. What if she'd had a sign from the universe then?

She orders her coffee and tries not to think too much about these things. A sign of things to come with Max, a sign Louis wasn't quite it, a sign that Ted _is_ — or isn't? — the one… It's hard to not worry once she's started, and Tracy pockets the change and takes her cup and decides Barney was right about this.

He isn't quite where she left him: he's wandered onto the lawn, looking pensively out at the grass. She crosses the still-green lawn to him, enjoying kicking her feet through the thin layer of leaves. "You were right," she tells him, handing him his change.

"I'm always right," he says. "What was I right about?"

"Signs are crazy person talk," she says. It isn't quite the weather for sunbathers on the grass, but some people are playing with a frisbee a few yards away; a couple sit with their dog in the sun. "You just gotta enjoy what you have while you have it."

"You just called Ted a crazy person," Barney reports delightedly.

"Yeah," Tracy says, risking a sip of her coffee, "but that's what I kinda like about him."

"It's one of many things he is wrong about," Barney continues, his voice grand in a way that usually implies he's working up to a speech. Tracy waits for them to head back to the path, to finish their loop and their lunch break, but Barney stays put, and she doesn't mind the sunshine. "Clothes. His hair. The correct ranking of James Bond films relative to one another."

"I get it," she says, hoping to cut him off before he gets to full steam.

"The true hero of _The Fugitive_."

"Okay," Tracy says, smiling, turning back towards the path.

"One more!" Barney pleads, putting his hand on her arm to stop her. She turns back. "Signs," he says.

"The crappy Mel Gibson movie?" she asks.

"No," he says. Tilts his head. "Well, probably. But no, signs from the universe. He's wrong about them. And so are you."

"What do you mean?" Tracy asks, heaving a breath, because she was honestly starting to hope they could just drop all this entirely.

"It's ironic," Barney says, "because he _almost_ had it right once. I mean, in the stupidest possible way, where he wasn't right at all," he adds with a little scoff. "but Ted almost got it." He has his lighter in his hand, gives it a flick now and then.

"You're going somewhere besides 'Ted Mosby is lame' with this, right?" Tracy asks, taking another sip of her coffee, thinking of the way he stopped her when she tried to go. She watches his face, thinks about bus benches and the blond guy she talked to, how she'd thought afterwards _hey, hope it works out_ , and not really wondered again after that; how she smiled at Ted's teary best man speech, and didn't know then that he was _Ted_. How there hadn't been a moment then where the universe had spoken to her, how there hadn't been one with Max, how there hadn't been one with her economics degree or her band or the summer she'd spent at horseback riding camp when she was eleven. How she never knows the way her life will end up until it has. That couple sitting over there with their dog; maybe they'll someday be her honorary aunt and uncle. One of the guys playing frisbee, maybe one of them is her actual 'soulmate,' whatever that means anymore.

This blond guy talking to her was once just a stranger, and now he's her friend she spends her lunches with, and he says, looking her right in the eye, "Do you need a sign from the universe to be with Ted?"

She inhales the crispy air. "No," says Tracy.

"But you don't know if you're, like, meant to be," Barney finishes for her, wrinkling his nose. "That's so stupid. I got married four months and sixteen days ago, and do you know when I figured out Robin and I were meant to be? When the universe said _Barney, this hot, awesome chick you're banging, she's_ it _?_ It's a trick question," he says unconcernedly, flicking his lighter. "It didn't happen. The universe said nothing."

"And that's… fine, right?" Tracy guesses, tries to guess, seeing that Barney is going somewhere but unable to figure out where.

He grins at her. "Do you think you and Ted are _it_?" He clicks his lighter as punctuation.

 _Yeah_ , she thinks, and wants to change that when said aloud, quantify it with hopes and desires, feelings but not promises, because this life, this summer, leaking fall: because. Things end. No matter how you feel, things can end. There are no signs. There are no promises. "I hope so," Tracy says with her eyes closed.

"Do you _want it_ to be it?" Barney asks, a trifle impatiently.

She opens her eyes and looks at him. "Yes," she says, and his eyes crinkle at the corners.

"There are no signs from the universe," Barney says, his smile growing, his eyes mischievous. "Robin's _it_ because I love her and I decided she was and I _got_ her. With some encouragement," he acknowledges, giving Tracy a little gesture.

"So you're saying me and Ted are soulmates if we want to be soulmates," she says, smiling and shaking her head a little, because he's so enthusiastic and she wants him to be right, she wants this fluttery feeling always, she wants to be standing here next week and next month and next year.

He takes a big step backwards, tossing his lighter from one hand to another, the metal gleaming silver in the sun. "I'm saying the only signs from the universe are the ones you make happen," he says, his blue eyes bright in the sun. "Hey," he says. "Want to see a magic trick?"

Tracy's heart beats heavy and warm, and she matches his grin, the way he looks so much younger than he is, bouncing on his heels, and he's right, even if she's not sure how Ted factors in, because there are no signs, just what you _want_ and what you want to _make_. "Sure," she says.

He extends out his lighter to her on the palm of his left hand, eyebrows raised expectantly. "Take it," he says.

She reaches out for it uncertainly, not sure what kind of magic trick he has planned, and as soon as her hand is a few inches away he curls his fingers around the lighter, holds it in his fist for a second, and turns his hand around, revealing his empty palm.

"Nice," says Tracy, dropping her hand.

" _Please_ ," he scoffs, his hand still extended. "Here's the one thing Ted Mosby was ever, ever right about: the only signs from the universe are the ones you make happen yourself."

Barney snaps his fingers,

and it starts to rain.

Water pours from everywhere, all at once, gleaming and shining in the sunlight, freezing cold and drenching Tracy from head to toe, mist and rainbows arching around her, her hair, her clothing, her scarf sticking to her body, leaves and grass growing slick and shiny with water. Barney is standing there, making no effort to cover himself from the deluge; she hears cries of dismay and annoyance from others on the grass, sees them running for shelter, sees the sun still shining and Barney grinning and realises it's not rain at all.

"You set off the sprinklers!" Tracy yells above the spraying water and whipping sounds.

"I made it rain!" he corrects, laughing, and he grabs Tracy's hand and drags her off the lawn, onto the pathway, out of the downpour. She's starting to shake from the cold and the wet, but she's laughing now, too, at the unexpectedness, at the still-running sprinklers, at the way Barney is _smiling_ , pushing his hair off his forehead, keeps turning back to look at his handiwork.

She laughs and shivers and grips her coffee and wraps her arms around herself. "I can't believe you set off the sprinklers! You're insane!" Tracy says, still laughing. "I'm soaked!"

He pulls his wet scarf from around his neck and drapes it over her shoulders uselessly, and leans in close enough that she's briefly concerned they're about to kiss. "It's meant to be if you mean it to be," he says, hiding his smile, his eyes bright, a trickle of water running down his cheekbone. "Just ask Ted."

She pulls his scarf around her as he pushes himself away again, still laughing to himself, pleased with himself, and she's smiling too, enough that it hurts the corners of her mouth, her coffee cup soggy in her hands, her life forming around her, friends and crazy people, neon signs and Ted Mosby, the sprinklers thrumming behind them for a minute longer before they turn themselves off, leaving the lawn sparkling in the October sunlight.


End file.
